Helen Gym (/ˈɡɪm/ GHIHM; Korean: 김혜련, born January 11, 1968) is an American politician. She was the first Asian American woman to serve on the Philadelphia City Council. She was first elected to Council in 2015 and served until 2022, when she resigned to run in the Democratic primary of the 2023 Philadelphia mayoral election. Gym finished in third place behind Cherelle Parker, who won the nomination, and Rebecca Rhynhart.

A member of the Democratic Party, Gym is a former school teacher and community organizer who cofounded Parents United for Public Education and served on the board of Asian Americans United. While on City Council, she became known as a progressive voice and focused on issues including housing, education, youth issues, and worker’s rights.

Gym was born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. Her parents were born in Korea and immigrated to the United States in the 1960s. Her father was a computer engineer who worked for Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. Her mother worked in the food services department at Ohio State University. Gym has a younger sister. When Gym was growing up, the family attended the Protestant Korean Church. Gym attended the University of Pennsylvania and majored in history. She described her time in college as a time for learning that she is "an all-or-nothing kind of person"; she was on the dean's list one semester while she was on the verge of academic expulsion in another semester. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.

After college, Gym returned to Ohio and worked for the Mansfield News Journal as a reporter. In 1994, she worked as a teacher at Lowell Elementary School in the Olney section of Philadelphia. During her four and a half years teaching at the school The Philadelphia Daily News ran multiple pieces revealing that the school was packing African American students into larger classes to free up resources for immigrant Asian students. The incident inspired Gym to leave the school and become an activist in order to "understand how to tackle head-on the fears and anger and needs that people desperately want to have addressed." In 1996, Gym completed her language acquisition master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2000, Gym led a campaign called the "Stadium Out of Chinatown Coalition" against the construction of a baseball stadium north of Chinatown, due to the fear that it might result in gentrification of the area.

Gym has worked as a grassroots community organizer in Philadelphia and has been involved in education reform in the city since 2006. Around that time, she co-founded the Parents United for Public Education. She is a member of the editorial board of Rethinking Schools and one of the founders of The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, a nonprofit, independent, free news service. She also co-founded a charter school in Chinatown called the Folk Art Cultural Treasures School.

She has also led other campaigns. In 2008, she fought against the establishment of the proposed Foxwoods Casino planned near Philadelphia's Chinatown because of the concern that unchecked development would compel longtime residents of that area to move away. She has also organized in opposition to state-sponsored, predatory gambling.

In 2009, she worked on a successful federal civil rights case to help stop the bullying and harassment of Asian American students in South Philadelphia High School. The case came about partially due to a series of assaults at the school on December 3, 2009, when as many as thirty Asian immigrant students were attacked and beaten by large groups of African-American students. In her testimony, she called for the commission to require the school and district officials bear responsibility for not addressing the problem, to differentiate bias-based harassment and generalized violence, and take a different approach for each, and to develop effective anti-harassment policies and procedures.